All-around fast

Windows® Internet Explorer® 9 is all-around fast, with HTML5 powered by the GPU that allows websites to take full advantage of the power of Windows-based PCs. Line-of-business applications that you deliver through the web are fast and responsive—like the native applications on a PC.

Waiting for the browser to do something can be frustrating. Internet Explorer 9 starts up and launches tabs more quickly than Internet Explorer 8 and provides a variety of ways for users to quickly access the websites that they need. All of these combine to provide enhanced productivity for information workers.

Hardware-accelerated text, videos, and graphics

New graphic capabilities and improved performance provide immersive and rich experiences in Internet Explorer 9. Hardware-accelerated text, video, and graphics mean that websites perform like applications installed directly on Windows PCs. High-definition videos are smooth, graphics are clearer and more responsive, colors are truer, and websites are more interactive. Websites and applications load faster and are more responsive with subsystem enhancements like the new JavaScript engine that utilizes the power of current multi-core processors to make the web feel incredibly responsive. By taking advantage of powerful new graphics capabilities on your PC, Internet Explorer 9 provides a premium web experience on Windows. If your PC does not have the hardware that is required to take advantage of the new graphic capabilities, Internet Explorer 9 automatically uses the Software Rendering option as the best way to display webpages. This is all handled automatically, without users needing to change any settings or options.

F12 developer tools

Internet Explorer 9 developer tools provide built-in features that help developers to rapidly prototype, test, and debug webpages. Building on the tools provided in Internet Explorer 8, developer tools include new capabilities and improvements:

A new tab for inspecting network traffic.

Improved performance for working with large JavaScript files. For example, files that contain 70,000 lines of code or more.

A user agent switching tool.

These tools help ensure that applications work with the latest version of Internet Explorer.

Web Timing API. With the developer tools in Internet Explorer 9, developers can now measure even more aspects of website performance than in previous versions of Internet Explorer. However, they cannot measure the performance that users actually experience. To solve this problem, some sites develop their own libraries that try to measure live performance on webpages, but this can introduce overhead that actually slows pages down. We believe that the W3C WebTiming specification—which, as of this writing, is in the “Working Draft” stage—is a good foundation for responsibly solving this problem. The WebTiming functionality can be accessed in Internet Explorer 9 using the window.msPerformance interface in the DOM. Developers can also enable script debugging in the Developer Tools, and then access the window.msPerformance object.